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As an alternative to this suggestion to enhance the ability to track feature requests, and thus the development of the SO platform, I'd like to suggest another alternative.

Rather than bookmarking searches externally, allow us to construct searches based on tags and keywords and store them for later use. These searches could acts as personalized filters that would be available just to the person who constructed it. A further extension could make these searches available to others as a "popular" search. These could be provided to the user by replacing the current search box with a combo box in which the dropdown is only available if the user has saved a particular search.

Searches could be saved either by using an interface to explicitly construct one or by clicking a "Add to Saved Searches" button (a plus icon next to the searches box?) that would take the current url, parse it for search terms to construct the saved search, and allow you to give it a friendly name. The interface for building searches could be extended to list the most popular searches (by construction and use) isolated from actual user data. These could simply be invoked from the page or added to the user's personal store.

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A good suggestion, but it seems like the benefit you get from the feature is pretty much linearly tied to the effort you put into the 'search construction' and sharing interfaces.

That is, if you just make it a set of internal dumb bookmarks, it's almost pointless. But if you add the nicer features you discuss (search construction, popular searches, distinct location in the UI), it'd be much more cool, and also much more challenging to implement.

I think for this to be actionable the "sweet spot" of functionality has to be set where it's not a multi-month development project and yet it's still useful. As software developers, I think we can all appreciate that a feature request should be as well-defined as possible before design and implementation begins.

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I personally wouldn't get any use out of it, but I'm not much of a "power searcher". I imagine it would be very useful for others who are constantly trawling through the older content, though.

It almost sounds like you are describing a stackoverflow version of a Google Custom Search Engine.

Edit: Also sounds familiar to Save Custom Searches for Quick Access

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    What I mostly want to get out of it is a way for everyone to get at feature requests, sorted by votes, that are not completed, declined, or marked by-design without everyone having to bookmark it themselves.
    – tvanfosson
    Aug 31, 2009 at 14:58

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